Aquarius Wept

And flights of Angels sang Meredith Hunter to his rest. After Woodstock and love came Altamont and disaster, and after Altamont came its definitive history in the pages of Esquire (now available for the first time online).

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Everybody had heard of The Rolling Stones, but until the day they played a free concert at the drag strip, nobody but hard-core auto-racing fans in Northern California had ever heard of Altamont. Even the press, trying to sort out what happened there that day, was unable to figure out whether Altamont was in Livermore or Tracy, the two nearest suburban towns.

Altamont is just a name on a map, a former flag stop on the Western Pacific Railroad, with a garage (W.J. Armstrong, Summit Garage, Altamont, California) and an abandoned church, and it's miles from the Altamont Raceway where the concert was held. The Raceway is in the crotch of the hills at the southeast end of the Livermore Valley, on the south side of the eight-lane freeway Interstate 580, about fifty miles east of Oakland. The day The Rolling Stones played there, the name became etched in the minds of millions of people who love pop music and who hate it as well. If the name "Woodstock" has come to denote the flowering of one phase of the youth culture, "Altamont" has come to mean the end of it.

It was the largest gathering of people in modern California history. As many as 300,00 may have been in attendance. And what happened was that a man was killed there, knifed and beaten to death within twenty feet of Mick Jagger as he was singing Under My Thumb. The victim was Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old black man, and his attackers were Hell's Angels, the outlaw motorcycle gang. The murder took place within the bright circle of light illuminating the performance area and before the cameras of the Maysles brothers, who were making a documentary film. The film shows clearly that Hunter had a gun in his hand before he was stabbed. The film also reveals the knife. Alan Passaro, twenty-five years old, has now been indicted by the Alameda County Grand Jury. Dozens of others in the audience were beaten and maimed by Hell's Angels using pool cues for weapons, a girl suffered a near-fatal skull fracture from a full beer can thrown by someone in the crowd, performers were knocked senseless or harassed by Angels in several brawls, two young people afterward were killed by a hit-and-run driver while they were sitting by a campfire, and a fourth was drowned in a ditch. No one but the lunatic fringe of the underground press has yet suggested that Meredith Hunter's murder and the other accidents were anything but results of irrational spontaneous violence, but one of the producers of the documentary film, an associate of the Maysles, commented excitedly after seeing the initial rushes, "We've got an In Cold Blood that wasn't staged."

Altamont has become the most significant act ever to be associated with rock music. Its repercussions have resulted in at least four California county ordinances banning large gatherings unless special and prohibitive measures are taken, and there are two bills in the California legislature proposing the same thing. The murder occurred in the early dusk on December 6, 1969. At the end of February, 1970, there had yet to be an arrest. Since Altamont lies in an unincorporated area, the County Sheriff has jurisdiction, and the Alameda County Sheriff's office put two men on the case. They interviewed dozens of people, subpoenaed the Maysles' film (and refused to show it to newsmen) and gathered together hundreds of photographs taken at the event. Yet even though the murder took place in full view of hundreds of people and was photographed and filmed, the Sheriff's office was slow in making an arrest. Critics of the Alameda County Sheriff's Department claim that a détente exists between the Angels and most of the police departments of the East Bay (Oakland and Alameda County). They point to the occasion when Hell's Angels interfered in an anti-draft march in 1965 at the city line between Berkeley and Oakland. The Oakland police at that time allowed the Angels through their lines to attack the marchers (the Berkeley police defended the marchers, one Berkeley officer suffering a broken leg in the melee). That story's follow-up — how the Hell's Angels were then turned on to LSD by Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey and how they later became the guardians of the children at the Great Human Be In in Golden Gate Park — is part of the San Francisco rock mythology which ended abruptly at Altamont.

Ralph "Sonny" Barger, chief of the Bay Area Angels, he who had sat with Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg in the front row of the Bob Dylan concert in Berkeley, he who had danced to the rock bands at a hundred dances in the Avalon, the Fillmore and California Hall, went on KSAN, San Francisco's underground FM station, the night after the Altamont murder and said, "We were told if we showed up, we could sit on the stage and drink some beer that the Stones' managers had brought us, you know. And I'm bum kicked about the whole thing. I didn't like what happened there. We were told we were supposed to sit on the stage and keep people off, and a little back, if we could. We parked where we were told we were supposed to park. Mostly, a little bit to the side of the stage so that people who were there didn't have to move back too far.

"Personally, I was there to sit on the stage and listen and drink this beer that we were promised. I didn't go there to fight. I went there to have a good time and sit on the stage. Finally, the Stones come out and they start playing. Everybody's having a good, good time. All of a sudden, someone down in front, where this one bike, right directly in front, was, is yelling. I myself jumped down there and the wiring has shorted out somewhere. The bike had caught fire. The people were packed right up to the stage. So I told them to back up so we can get this fire out. Nobody'd back up. Some other Angels caught what was happening and came off the stage, and when they did, people started backing up.

"Now I ain't saying anything about no Angel hit anybody. I know some of them hit people. But they moved them people back out of the way of the bike. And we got the fire put out. In the process, you know what, some people got hit. And you know what? Some of them people were like maybe them Friday-nighters that got that front row, I don't know, but they didn't want to give up that spot even to put that fire out. And when they come back fightin', they got thumped. And a lot of time there was six or seven Angels on one guy, and a lot of times there wasn't. After that happened, we got the fire out. And everything was cool. The people moved back in again."

Barger claimed people started knocking over the Angels' bikes. "Now I don't know if you think we pay fifty dollars for them things, or steal them, or pay a lot for them, or what. But most people that's got a good Harley chopper got a few grand invested in it. Ain't nobody gonna kick my motorcycle. And they might think because they're in a crowd of 300,000 people that they can do it and get away with it. But when you're standing there looking at something that's your life, and everything you got is invested in that thing, and you love that thing better than you love anything in the world, and you see a guy kick it, you know who he is. And if you got to go through fifty people to get to him, you're gonna get to him.

"We moved them people to save that bike. And, after that, they tried to destroy our bikes, and we're not gonna stand for it. And that made it personal...You know what? I'm a violent cat when I got to be. But I don't really want to be. But there ain't nobody gonna take anything I got and try to destroy it. Mick Jagger, he put it all on the Angels.

"Look, I ain't no cop. I ain't never going to ever pretend to be a cop. I didn't go there to police nothing. They told me if I could sit on the edge of the stage so nobody would climb over me, I could drink beer until the show was over. That's what I went there to do...I'm no peace creep, by any sense of the word, and if a cat don't want to fight with me, don't want to hassle with me, I want to be his friend. If he don't want to be my friend, then out of sight, don't even talk to me. But if he don't want to be my friend and he's gonna get in my face, I'm gonna hurt him, or he's gonna hurt me. And you know what? It doesn't really matter if he hurts me, because I've been hurt before. And I've been hurt by experts. Over the years, though, I've learned how to get up and do it again."

The Angels haven't done any talking since, and they specifically won't talk to the press. The underground, which means non-Angels who are close to Angels, says that even within the Angels' community there have been repercussions. Some officers of the San Francisco club, for instance, are said to have dropped out, and other Angels, faced with a new kind of crisis, have left. One Angel, Terry the Tramp, who was close to the rock bands (he was one of the investors in the Carousel Ballroom which The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane operated for a brief time before Bill Graham, the ever-expanding entrepreneur of San Francisco's rock, took it over), committed suicide in mid-February with an overdose of sleeping pills, driven by the murder, his friends say, to emotional collapse. When the Angels confiscated the luxurious carpet on which Jagger had performed, Terry the Tramp returned it.

It is clear, too, that the tight group loyalty among the Angels and their fans has begun to erode. Passaro's identification proves that. The sequence from the film showing the knife-wielding Angel was blown up and prints were shown to Angels and witnesses. For almost three months no one would admit knowing who it was who held the knife, but finally someone talked. Police at the time of the indictment would not say who had made the identification. Passaro, who has a police record for theft dating back to 1963, was, ironically, already in jail when indicted. He had been arrested in San Jose in July, 1969, for the sale of marijuana and for theft, had pleaded guilty to the former, but sentencing was held up to await disposition of the latter. He had been free on bail at the time of the Altamont killing. Between the killing and his indictment, he had pleaded guilty on the theft charge and was sent to jail. He was the only Angel indicted, although there is the strong possibility other indictments will follow, now that the identification block has been broken. The Maysles' film clearly shows Angels stomping Hunter after the stabbing, and police feel that identification of them may now be relatively easy.

Whatever they say now, the significant thing about the Alameda County Sheriffs on the evening of December 6, 1969, when the huge crowd gathered at Altamont, is that they were not there. Only two eyewitnesses have ever mentioned seeing any uniformed police officers anywhere that night, and the Sheriff says he had no plainclothesmen at the event. Bill Belmont, who was equipment manager for The Rolling Stones' coast-to-coast tour and who was on the Altamont site for more than twenty-four hours before the show began, says there simply were no police, at least not before the show began, when he went looking for some. "We had to get an emergency highway-patrol permit to bring in a crane to lift the big light towers into place and I jumped into my Rover and went looking for a cop and I couldn't find one. I eventually ran out of gas!"

Although there were no police at the concert site, there were security guards. One group consisted of half-a-dozen or so short-haired musclemen wearing golf jackets. These had flown out the night before from New York. And there were guards to protect the Altamont grounds. The rest of the security force consisted of Hell's Angels. They sat on the stage, lined the area in front of it, and controlled access to the backstage area. At nine the morning of the concert (which began close to noon) drunken Hell's Angels were brawling and cavorting and throwing full beer cans, according to Ron Schneider, the New York personal manager who had arranged The Rolling Stones' coast-to-coast concert tour and was functioning as the Stones' business manager. "I was terrified," Schneider said after the concert. "There was even a fight between the Frisco Angels and the Angels from San Jose. We were petrified to death. Even our own people were getting beat. We couldn't control anyone."

When The Rolling Stones decided to return to active touring and, especially, to return to the U.S., the idea of a free concert in San Francisco was already implanted. Mick Jagger facetiously said at one press conference that he was all for a free tour, but the other guys needed the money! Guitarist Keith Richards, in London before the tour and later, emphasized his desire to appear free in one or preferable more concerts. What actually happened was that the Stones' management put together a tour which, far from being free, was one of the highest-priced in the history of U.S. concert tours as well as being one of the most successful and profitable (the Stones reputedly made four hundred thousand dollars).

As the story began to break in the various rock-oriented underground papers and in the overground columns, it developed that the Stones' management had, in the Stones' name, made exorbitant demands on promoters all over the country and even inserted clauses in the contract saying that there could be no student discount for tickets. One of the most unusual parts of the contract was the demand that the concert promoter in each individual area put up the entire guarantee upon signing the contract, rather than half on signing and half the night of the concert, as is customary. This meant that promoters had to tie up thirty, forty, and sometimes fifty thousand dollars for weeks in advance. Michael Lydon in Ramparts claims that the money was then leased out in short-term notes for eight and a half percent, but no one will admit it now.

Jagger held a press conference when he arrived in Los Angeles and was asked about the prices. He shrugged of the question saying, "We can't set the price of tickets, I don't know how much people can afford." But later, those who were in the inner circle say, he was furious, just as he became furious when anyone spoke of his $250,000 London house or the royalties from his records and songs. Actually, the contract with the promoters said ticket prices were subject to approval by "the artist."

One reason the Stones and Jagger were very sensitive about money was that they had been adopted by the New Left as musical revolutionary spokesmen, supplanting even Dylan and certainly taking over from The Beatles. (John Lennon had said, "If you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.") Jagger had sung about the "songs of marchin', chargin' feet," in Street Fighting Man and the Stones had long been the symbol of hard-edge battle against pretense and straight-world hypocrisy. "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste..." Jagger sang in Sympathy for the Devil.

So it is not surprising that there were increased rumblings about the Stones' ticket prices and about the ethics of the extraordinary profits from their tour. Emissaries kept trying to reach the Stones to ask them to play free. Actually, Jagger and his associates were discussing the idea of a free concert in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Rock Scully, once the manager of The Grateful Dead but now free-lancing as a proselyter for the San Francisco hip scene, made contact with Sam Cutler, then Mick Jagger's confidant and chief of staff for the commercial tour. Scully, Emmett Grogan and other San Franciscans even approached the Stones midway in the tour for money for other free concerts not involving the Stones.

Finally, Sam Cutler made a trip to San Francisco to scout out the terrain. It was all supposed to be hush-hush; the affair was to be spontaneous and as intimate as possible. Scully proposed that the Stones merely show up on a weekend night and play a set at the Fillmore Ballroom with no advance notice. ("What a trip!" he said excitedly.) Scully and Grogan contacted the San Francisco City Parks & Recreation office concerning the possibility of allowing free music in Golden State Park on a weekend in December (after the Stones' tour was over) without saying what they had in mind. Nothing was decided, because the Parks people were leery of commitment.

As the tour ground to a close, the San Francisco contingent plotted the logistics of the magic event. Emmett Grogan and Scully had it all worked out. Grogan's solution to the first problem raised by the Stones — how to keep the musicians from being mobbed and possibly hurt by their audience — was to involve the Hell's Angels. "We'll have a hundred Hell's Angels on their Hogs escort the Stones into Golden Gate Park. Nobody'll come near the Angels, man. They won't dare," Grogan said.

Although by this time the Angels seemed like a normal part of the San Francisco scene, they had never before been put into such a position of authority, a position where authority was loosely defined, and in the exercise of which they were to get a truckload of free beer. On a radio broadcast the night after the concert, the secretary of the Frisco Angels, a motorcyclist called Pete, said on the air that Sam Cutler had approached the Frisco Angels about two weeks before the December 6 date and asked them to be a kind of security force. "We were asked to do this thing and we did it. If we say we're going to do something, we do it. Cutler, he was real sincere, and he offered us $500 worth of beer to do this thing...when people ask us to do something, if we decide to do it, it's done. No matter how far we have got to go to do it."

By the time the Stones' tour ended it was obvious that Golden Gate Park was out. The story of the possible free concert had been broken in the Los Angeles Free Press by John Carpenter who got it from Stanley Booth, a Memphis rock writer who was on the Stones' tour doing a book about them. Booth, and then Jo Bergman, Mick Jagger's personal assistant, said it was all set. The story appeared in the L.A. Free Press and then the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle. The City Parks & Recreation people denied any plans for Golden Gate Park. Instead, they suggested the possibility of one of the unused Federal forts in the San Francisco area, Fort Funston, for instance. Then the Stones' regular business managers came into the picture and promised the local planners they would get some other site. The first one they picked was the Sears Point Raceway, and auto-racing track well-known in Northern California. It had a natural amphitheatre, good fencing for crowd control, and isolation from areas the crowd might damage. The management of Sears Point accepted the free-concert idea, pending approval of the three cities near the site, Vallejo, Napa, and Novato.

By noon on Thursday, December 4, a stage had been built and huge towers for the lights were being erected. "We only had $2500 from the Stones," Rock Scully says (Bill Belmont says $15,000), "the rest was all donated. People just gave us things." Chip Monck, who had staged the Stones' concerts and the Woodstock Festival, put together the huge structure with a volunteer crew. Then everything went wrong

There had been some indication of crossed wires a few days before when the question of the film rights to the event was brought out. In New York, a spokesman from the Stones' businesses office said that the money from the film would go to one charity. In San Francisco the organizers spoke of Vietnam orphans, or war relief. Finally there was talk, mostly from New York, of using the money to buy a piece of land where concerts could be held free anytime. Jagger, it developed, would not get involved in the Vietnam situation. "That's yours," he is reported to have said to some of the Americans talking to him. Next it turned out that Sears Point was owned by Filmways, the holding company which also operated Concert Associates in Los Angeles. Concert Associates had booked the Stones in Los Angeles, the group had reneged on an arrangement to play a second concert there, and the feeling between them was hostile.

Filmways representatives flew up from Los Angeles and met with the Stones' business agent Ron Schneider and others and were said to have abrogated the original agreement to allow the concert to take place at Sears Point. "The Filmways people demanded a huge liability insurance and $100,00 rent, or distribution rights to the film," Ron Schneider said. "All they were interested in was the money." No agreement was possible. And so late Thursday afternoon, at a press conference in the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, it was announced that the Sears Point concert was canceled and that an alternate site would be sought.

By this time, the operator of the Altamont drag strip, Dick Carter, had entered the scene. Carter's Altamont was a fairly new enterprise and, in another of the bizarre coincidences of this entire affair, had been selected by James Wynn, a student at Stanford, as a requirement for a course in Small Business Administration, to see how Wynn could further the racetrack's business. They had talked about having small rock concerts at Altamont before the Stones came to San Francisco, and when Wynn heard that the Sears Point concert had been canceled, he called Carter, who in turn called concert headquarters. Melvin Belli then learned of the offer and contacted Carter, who said: "Use Altamont and use it free. There's no way we'll lose money. The added publicity, all over the Bay Area, is enough alone to compensate for the canceling of our regular program. And, anyway, we stand to make a lot of money on our own concessions. We're stocking up good for the expected throng of kids."

Chip Monck went out to Altamont late Thursday night, returned and agreed rather reluctantly that it would do. Early the next day trucks and helicopters carried all the stage equipment from Sears Point at the top of the Bay down through the East Bay cities and fifty miles on out to the rolling hills of Altamont. "When I got there in the morning, Friday, I took one look at it and said, I think it was to a radio crew from a Sacramento station, that it wouldn't do," Rock Scully recalls. "It was terrible. It was just a drag strip. There were junk cars and wrecks and broken glass all over. I said we'd have thousands of people with their feet cut from the broken glass alone."

But the magic of the idea of a free Rolling Stones concert had taken hold too deeply for it to be stopped now. Even the previous night, when Sears Point was canceled, the throng had been gathering. Long-haired kids walked out along the country roads to Sears Point. Volunteer workers were arriving and offering their services. When the deal was made for Altamont, the two top-40 radio stations, KFRC and KYA, told their listeners about it minute by minute. Local television plugged the concert on Friday as did the afternoon San Francisco Examiner and the suburban afternoon papers. Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle put the new on the front page, and the rush was on.

People started arriving before dark on Friday night, Bill Belmont says. "We announced to everybody that the gates wouldn't open until the next morning, but they came anyway." Helicopters buzzed around the site like bees, bringing in people. Mick Jagger got to San Francisco that evening, went on the air from his hotel and then drove to Altamont in a rented limousine with his managers. They ran out of gas.

At the site "it was like a Boy Scout Jamboree," Belmont says. "People had little official pink cards, cut in half, as identification. We had a tent and the Dead's family was cooking. We fed the crew great. Ribs. Open fires. Mick and Keith walked in after their limo ran out of gas. Keith stayed all night. He didn't worry. There was no security at all then. They had a great time and everybody else did that night."

Some people drove on to Tracy or back toward the hills, to Livermore or Pleasanton, to stay overnight in motel in order to get a good start for the site in the morning. Hundreds of other just camped out wherever they were.

The media was set to see Altamont in a sunny light, a sort of reprise of Woodstock's good vibes. But good vibes were scarce on Saturday, December 6. Bill Thompson, manager of the Jefferson Airplane, and Chet Helms, of the Family Dog, described Altamont — the motorcycle racetrack and Demolition Derby site — as a permanent holding ground for tense vibrations. One of the underground weeklies pointed out that the moon was in Scorpio and it was a heavy day! The Stones arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth ran at Jagger screaming, "I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!" He slugged Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day. The truth was that the kind of time one had at Altamont depended upon where one sat. If you got there early and sat down near the stage, you saw the concentration of Hell's Angels, saw them beating people, and had a nasty feeling from the beginning. "That was an ugly crowd," Rock Scully says. "When you'd get up to go to the john, you'd get karate chopped on the legs as you stepped through the crowd." Even the Hell's Angels complained that the crowd was ugly enough to make uncomplimentary remarks about Hell's Angels. When the last Angel contingent came riding through about midafternoon, a girl in the crowd said something with an edge to it. One of the Angels stopped his bike, turned to the girl riding behind him and said, "You gonna let he say that about a Hell's Angel?" The Angel's girl got off the bike and belted the girl who had made the remark, then remounted and rode down to the stage.

"The people who weren't near the stage had a good time," Bill Belmont says, but that wasn't always true either. Barry Olivier and his wife and son, for instance, had gotten there midmorning, driving on a back road after staying overnight in a motel to get an early start. "The drive in was the most interesting part of the day, in some ways. Hundreds were walking, I'm sure they didn't know how far it was. Many others were parking along the road, and in a few places we had to squeeze between parked cars, almost scraping on one side or the other. They were parked one deep on one side and two deep on the other, on a very narrow road to start with. There were some waits, perhaps up to twenty minutes in a single spot at one time. Many were hitching and other jumping on top of car hoods or even tops.

"A big manned balloon was just being inflated as we came over a rise and saw the crowd. It was smaller than I thought it would be and the people seemed less in a mood of anticipation than I had expected they would. We walked down toward the denser part of the crowd before determining to go up to the rear, where we could sit down easily and spread out without being crowded. People back there did seem more relaxed, and we spread our blankets and paraphernalia and sat down. It was about ten or fifteen feet between small groups and individuals at the back, perhaps 250 yards from the stage — which we had a hard time making out at first, even with good binoculars brought along for the purpose.

"Just about fifteen minutes after we got settled in our spot at the back, the music began. Immediately the sound problem struck me as overwhelming — that was the single most important factor in keeping us from really enjoying the day. You just couldn't hear the music — although you could understand the announcements. I hoped they would get it fixed, but they didn't while we were there. Another very negative element was the announcer (Sam Cutler, I discovered later). He spoke very condescendingly to all of us in the gathering and he was negative from the outset. Instead of talking with us as though we were in this together and would help each other, he talked at us, as though we were some kind of unmanageable beings which were as likely to cause trouble as not.

"Right away everyone became aware that trouble was breaking out around the stage, as the music stopped repeatedly during Santana's opening part, and then again during the Airplane's — although back where we were it was not apparent how bad the vibes were down there.

"We walked around some and dug the people, some of whom were very interesting, some very bummed out, most were extremely neutral — just kind of waiting for the show. Shortly after we had sat down, a heavy nude guy came walking down from behind us and of course right on down toward the stage. He was the only nude we saw all day — and that also surprised me. I though there would be more people sans clothes. The motorcyclists were riding quite near people, coming as close to us as one foot away — just to show their prowess and skill, I figured. The constant buzzing of helicopters plus the light aircraft (I counted as many as seven planes and helicopters over us at one time) made the experience seem unpleasant, too. At first it was kind of exciting, but after a couple of hours it got to be a drag."

At about three p.m., the Oliviers left. Curiously enough, many others were leaving at this point too, although the Stones had yet to go on. Elsewhere in the crowd at the back, Sister Mary Korte, the poet, felt the bad vibrations from people near her, but many others had a great time. The only real problem back on the hill was when someone stepped on you or your food.

At the stage site, things became increasingly chaotic. People tried to climb onto the stage. A hysterical, topless girl, huge breasts flapping, tried to get onstage and the Angels pulled her down. "Angels were throwing people off the stage all afternoon," Belmont says. "I was terrified." Several times the musicians tried to calm down the crowd. "Every time the bands played a violent song there was trouble," poet John Thomson said. "Only the Flying Burritos played without any trouble at all. There was trouble when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang It's Been a Long Time Coming, and when the Airplane sang The Other Side of This Life. Marty Balin, the Airplane's lead singer, jumped offstage into a group of Angels and tried to stop them from beating up a young black man. He was joined by Airplane manager Bill Thompson, Belmont, and several others. One of the Angels decked Balin and when Thompson asked, "What did you do that for?" replied, "He spoke disrespectful to a brother Angel." Paul Kantner, still onstage, asked, "What's going on? They're beating up on my lead singer!"

It has never been established whether or not this black man was the one later killed. In any case, the incident was typical. Somebody would move, yell or take some action that would draw a stream of Angels offstage like a swarm of bees into a struggling mass.

Denise Jewkes, a singer and guitarist with the Ace of Cups ("An All Lady Band," their business card reads), walked down near the stage to join some musician friends. Suddenly a can of beer thrown by someone (Hell's Angels played catch with full beer cans all afternoon) hit her above the eye. Bloody and dazed, she wandered around trying to find out how to get to the Red Cross tent. She saw Jagger and the Stones go onstage, but she was too hurt to listen. Finally she found a doctor who saw she was seriously injured and managed to send her to the Livermore hospital where, she says, dozens of young people, bum-tripped, beaten, or cut, were gathered.

The medical facilities for the huge crowd were clearly inadequate despite heroic efforts of a volunteer crew for the Medical Committee for Human Rights. "We had less than twenty-four hours to plan a medical presence there," said Dr. Richard Fine, acting assistant medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital outpatient department. "We mustered nine physicians including several psychiatrists, twelve registered nurses, and some forty medics. We were terribly undersupplied. We got four vans there with medical supplies and almost immediately had to send out for more. There was an amazing lack of concern by the kids for their own health. Pregnant women, some overdue, walked miles getting into the place." Dr. Fine charged "totally irresponsible management" and called the event "a reprehensible act by The Rolling Stones, the various managers and promoters." No children were born there, he said, despite the claims by those in charge that three babies arrived. "They were just trying to balance off the deaths that occurred."

Late in the afternoon, as the sun began to dip back of the range of hills that lies between the Livermore Valley area and the San Francisco Bay, it got cold, but most of the crowd was determined to wait for The Rolling Stones. There was a long wait, almost three quarters of an hour, before the Stones went on. It was just like one of their regular concerts across the country where, in every auditorium from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Auburn, Alabama, they had titillated the audience with a long wait, a dramatic tease to bring the crowd to a fever pitch before they appeared. Just before the group went on, photographer Jim Marshall, standing alongside Sam Cutler, heard him say to an Angel, "Just do what you have to do, and don't let anybody get near the Stones." This corroborates the story the Angels told on the radio later — Cutler and the Stones were worried that screaming teeny-boppers would tear them apart. They came on in a burst of energy, surrounded by Angels and their own New York guards. The crowd roared.

It was becoming dark and the lights illuminated the stage and an area around it. A black man suddenly was involved in a scuffle with an Angel, then a stream of Angels flew off the stage, clustered around him. There was a flash, he waved in the air, ran away from the stage and fell to the ground, Angels on top of him.

Mick Jagger was singing. The music stopped as the fighting erupted and Keith Richard put down his guitar and yelled, "If you don't cool it, we're not going to play." Jagger said, "Brothers and sisters, come on now...everybody just cool out, everybody! Come on now." He leaned over the side of the stage, "Are you all right?" he asked. The Stones started again and then again stopped. "Why are we fighting?" Jagger cried. They played and they begged the crowd to control itself. "We need a doctor and an ambulance," Jagger said, as he urged the crowd to let the medics through.

The Stones continued their set with the audience screaming and shouting and the Angels faithfully following their orders. As the group went into their final numbers, and the film crews ground away, Meredith Hunter lay unconscious and dying. Robert Hiatt, a medic resident at the San Francisco Public Health Hospital, had carried Hunter backstage. "He had serious wounds," Hiatt said. "It was obvious he wasn't going to make it." Dr. Richard Baldwin, a volunteer in charge of the medical facilities, said, "There's nothing they could have done to save him." Around eleven that night, Hunter's body was delivered to the coroner's office. The autopsy the following day showed that everybody knew: he had been stabbed and beaten to death.

The Sunday Examiner/Chronicle covered the story as if it were another Woodstock gathering of peace and love and grass. Television did the same all that night, playing down the death and the violence. The Examiner crew had to get back to write their stories before the Stones went on and they had been programmed to see it as "300,000 Say It With Music." The Monday morning Chronicle, on the other hand, had plenty of time to assimilate what had happened and they ran the pictures of the Angels wielding pool cues and long stories about the violence, the beer, and the drugs.

Jagger, who was visibly shaken when he left Altamont, was reached later that evening at the Huntington Hotel. "I know San Francisco by reputation. It was supposed to be lovely here — not uptight. What happened? What's gone wrong? If Jesus had been there, He would have been crucified."

The aftermath of Altamont is still evolving, after months. "Altamont socked it to a lot of people," Rock Scully said. And Bill Thompson, the Airplane's manager, remarked that "a lot of personal relationships were burned behind Altamont." The event challenged the basic "do-your-own-thing" ethic on which the whole of San Francisco music and hip culture had been based. "It wasn't just the Angels. It was everybody," one young lady said later. "There was no love, no joy. In twenty-four hours we created all the problem of our society in one place: congestion, violence, dehumanization. Is this what we want?"

The Alameda Board of Supervisors began an investigation, not of the lack of police surveillance nor of the murder, but of the possibility that the use permit on which the Altamont strip operated should be revoked. Eventually it was not revoked, but explicitly made invalid for rock concerts and huge gatherings. The Alameda Sheriff's Department began its investigation. Immediately after the event Ron Schneider claimed that the Stones had a $5,000,000 liability-insurance policy, but no one has been able to make any contact with the musicians to collect for hospital bills or damages. A group of Alameda County ranchers filed a $900,00 damage suit against the Altamont Raceway, The Rolling Stones, and practically everybody else.

Jagger and The Rolling Stones surfaced in London a few days after the concert. Jagger remained silent, but Mick Taylor (the new Rolling Stone) told the press he had been terrified, and Keith Richard was quoted as saying it was, on the whole, a good concert.

Nobody ever did quarrel with the music the Stones played at Altamont. Let it bleed is the title of their most recent album and it fitted the occasion. They played like men possessed. Two months later Tom De Vries, who had covered the event with a cameraman for local educational TV, said it had taken him until just then to realize that, despite all the carnage he had witnessed, The Rolling Stones were the best goddamned band he had ever heard.

Underneath the speculation and the comparisons to Woodstock there lies the feeling that Altamont was a bummer from the beginning. It was conceived in error and organized in haste. Bill Graham blames Chip Monck for building the stage so low people could get on it from the audience. Timothy Leary notes that power-mad and ego-mad people gravitated to the stage and that the microphone was not utilized for community needs, as it had been at Woodstock, but to lecture and to scold. Leary also points out the difference in drugs between Altamont and Woodstock; at Altamont, there was alcohol, speed, and heroin, and Jagger himself was drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels onstage.

Out at the site, the Altamont Raceway looks abandoned. There is no trace of The Rolling Stones concert. Across the street, there are some new no trespassing signs, and at the nearest crossroads café, about a half mile on the other side of the freeway, the bartender, a short man with a pencil-thin moustache, says he doesn't remember anything about it at all. In fact, he says, "I wasn't even here then." In back of him there is a fly-specked sign which reads: "Try this pot, it's loaded with sausages steamed in beer." In the corner the jukebox stands. There are over a hundred records on it. None are by The Rolling Stones.

"There are some things which aren't true even if they did happen," Ken Kesey once said. Altamont is like that.